To strongly protest against going to school with Little Hai, Xiao Xian staged a sit-in for three days; however, the protest ultimately proved futile.
She had to resort to another method, implementing delaying tactics—claiming she would go to school only after the rice was planted. The elder, thinking that pushing too hard would backfire, agreed to give Xiao Xian half a month more time.
Half a month is really not enough for anything, not to mention the full set of spring farming tasks. At this time, Xiao Xian fully demonstrated the tenacity of the "Blossoming Flowers" techniques from the Yunteng Sect, managing to accomplish quite a bit in that time.
Although Zhu Shijun didn’t care much for Xiao Xian’s rice paddy, he found a village carpenter to make a lightweight hoe, specially tailored for Xiao Xian, and put together a small bucket as part of an early seedling cultivation toolset, in order to not dampen the child’s enthusiasm and to encourage the habit of seeing things through to the end.
With Sister-in-law Lian’s cooperation, Xiao Xian fenced off a plot of land at the edge of the village to plant rice—seedling cultivation had to come first. The rotten alfalfa became a thick layer of humus, which was no less fertile than the decades-old accumulation from Water Fir; using alfalfa or Purple Geranium to fertilize the field was an old habit of the Yunteng Sect, it just wasn’t popular in this world. As Yun Qing, the master of Zhou Xiaoxian, said, what comes from the soil should return to it.
Xiao Xian didn’t need to learn from Zhu Shijun to go up the mountain to survey and could guess why the soil of Leigong Mountain was infertile. With frequent rain along the mountain in the Southwest, the fertile surface layer accumulated over decades by trees was washed away by rain, and the mountain was planted with economically good-looking but useless timber. With poor access, timber couldn’t be transported down, and planting the same vegetation every year exhausted the soil even more.
Although the villagers followed ancient methods, using straw ash as fertilizer, its effect was only one-tenth that of the alfalfa, and moreover, it brought about thick miasma after the autumn harvest and sometimes even caused wildfires.
However, merely using alfalfa as fertilizer couldn’t 100% guarantee the robust growth of the seedlings. The key to good rice growth is the seedlings. Xiao Xian, with a thick skin, requested a gentle cut from the "sugarcane seedling" in exchange for ten iron nails, and obtained a few drops of the precious Iron Immortal Liquid.
Ever since the "sugarcane seedling" absorbed a six-seat van, it showed a tendency to grow leaves again. Remembering past lessons, it asked Xiao Xian not to target it for seed leaves but agreed to provide an appropriate amount of sap in an equitable exchange.
After the price was settled, Xiao Xian saw a few droplets of light green, gel-like sap appearing on the surface of the sugarcane seedling’s stem. After collecting the slightly sticky sap, Xiao Xian took a basin, drew well water, dissolved the sap in the water, and then soaked all three big jars of India Fragrant Rice in it. After soaking the seed, Xiao Xian picked a good weather day to sun-dry the seeds for a day or two to eliminate the dampness and mildew.
After soaking overnight, the rice grains all swelled up, and mold spots that had grown on the surface of the rice seeds for who knows how many years fell off. After scooping them out and draining the water, the rice seeds looked to have doubled in size from when they were first bought, and the surface shimmered with a golden luster.
Once all the basic work was completed, Xiao Xian began her "seedling cultivation" task. She used three partitions of the nursery bed for the total of three acres of rice field to be planted. With Sister-in-law Lian assisting, Xiao Xian used a bamboo pole to measure each nursery bed’s size roughly, set the width at 1.5 meters, and prepared the soil to a depth of about 7-8 centimeters. After clearing out the undecomposed alfalfa, she used a rice sieve to sift fine soil suitable for covering the rice seeds.
The enthusiastic Sister-in-law Lian also brought over half a bag of calcium phosphate fertilizer leftover from last year, claiming it would strengthen the seedlings if mixed into the soil. However, after Xiao Xian learned that her family’s rice yield was only a mere 400 jin last year, she firmly refused to use that bag of fertilizer.
"A fertilizer that yields only 400 jin per mu, if my seeds were to use it, wouldn’t they be poisoned to death," Xiao Xian made up her mind; those fertilizers were the culprits for further impoverishing the mountain soil. It’s said that China’s grain production has increased, but that’s all been achieved by heavy reliance on fertilizers (this is true, comrades, we are all eating grains grown with chemical fertilizers). If we keep going , with the soil quality destroyed, what will Chinese people eat a hundred years from now?